In a passive optical network (Passive Optical Network, PON), functions of an optical network terminal (Optical network terminal, ONT) managed by an optical line terminal (Optical Line Terminal, OLT) need to be continuously enhanced with large-scale commercial use of fiber to the home (Fiber To The Home, FTTH). Therefore, a version upgrade operation needs to be constantly performed on the ONT managed by the OLT.
In practice, a process of performing an upgrade operation on an ONT can be summarized as follows: An element management system (Element Management System, EMS) receives version numbers of various types of ONTs reported via an OLT, and compares the version numbers reported by the various types of ONTs with version numbers of various types of ONTs saved on the EMS, and determines various types of to-be-upgraded ONTs according to comparison results. The OLT performs a version upgrade operation on the various types of to-be-upgraded ONTs in sequence. That is, for each type of to-be-upgraded ONT, the OLT determines whether it is the first time to perform an upgrade operation on this type of ONT. If it is the first time to perform an upgrade operation on this type of ONT, the OLT may acquire, from the EMS, an upgrade version file for this type of ONT, and deliver the upgrade version file to this type of ONT, so that this type of ONT performs a version upgrade operation. Alternatively, if it is not the first time to perform an upgrade operation on this type of ONT, an upgrade version file for this type of ONT is already saved in a flash of the OLT, and the OLT may directly extract the upgrade version file for this type of ONT from the flash and deliver the upgrade version file to this type of ONT, so that this type of ONT performs a version upgrade operation.
It is discovered in practice that, in the foregoing process of performing an upgrade operation on various types of ONTs, the upgrade operation performed on the various types of ONTs is controlled by an OLT, and when there is a relatively large quantity of various types of to-be-upgraded ONTs, a workload of the OLT is increased, thereby affecting performance of OLT services, such as service provisioning, user status monitoring, and user bandwidth allocation. In addition, in the foregoing process of performing an upgrade operation on various types of ONTs, the OLT performs an upgrade operation on various types of to-be-upgraded ONTs in a serial processing manner, which generally results in a very long time for upgrading the various types of to-be-upgraded ONTs, thereby affecting ONT upgrade efficiency.